For the past 20 years, the integrated circuit (IC) device density has doubled about every 18 months. When the gate length of integrated circuits is less than 0.18 .mu.m, the propagation time or delay time is dominated by interconnect delay instead of device gate delay. To address this problem, new materials with low dielectric constants (K) are being developed. The aim of this development is to decrease time constant (RC delay), decrease power consumption, and decrease cross-talk in integrated circuits. There are two groups of low K dielectric materials, the traditional inorganic group exemplified by SiO.sub.2, and newer organic polymers, exemplified by poly(para-xylylene). Organic polymers are considered an improvement over inorganic low dielectric materials because the K of organic polymers can be as low as 2.0. However, most of these organic polymers have serious problems. Specifically, they have insufficient thermal stability, and are difficult and expensive to manufacture in a vacuum system.
For IC features of 0.35 .mu.m, current production lines use materials consisting primarily of SiO.sub.2. The SiO.sub.2 products have dielectric constants ranging from 4.0 to 4.5. In addition, stable fluorinated SiO.sub.2 materials with a dielectric constant of 3.5 have been achieved. These SiO.sub.2 -containing materials are primarily obtained from plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD), photon assisted chemical vapor deposition (PACVD), and high density plasma chemical vapor deposition (HDPCVD) of various siloxane containing compounds such as trimethylsiloxane (TMS), tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS) and silazanes in conjunction with SiF.sub.4, C.sub.2 F.sub.4.